1/4
Recommended (87 hrs on record)

FINAL FANTASY XIII is a beautiful adventure of a party of travelers who united by chance. And we, as outside observers of this story, gradually begin to empathize with our heroes. The travelers on the run, they are being chased after they opposed government forces, supporting the rebellion. Not everyone in our group trusts each other, each person has own goals, and some even hate each other. But due to the constant troubles and the chase that overtakes them, they do not have time to deal with each other. And yet, after some time, when they learn more and more about their companions, who risk their lives to protect them, mutual understanding arises between our heroes. They forgive each other, become closer, trust each other and are finally ready to unite for real in order to continue their path to the goal that a Deity imposed on them, cursing our heroes when It was awakened during the big battle at the very beginning of the game.

2/4
The game setting is unique and unlike anything in the previous games of the series. These are combat suits from the future, soldiers in futuristic armor, ships with aerodynamic fuselages, energy weapons and the bizarre fauna with various monsters, as well as rusty autonomous robots guarding large cave complexes. Very beautiful cinematic scenes that we watch during breaks between battles look great even now.

The gameplay is an Active Time Battle system, with the ability to directly control only one character from the party. During the battle, each character has their own scale of actions, and when it is filled, you can perform as many actions as this scale allows. The rest of the characters in the party are controlled by the game AI.

There are no professions like, for example, in FINAL FANTASY III, here, instead, each character has several of their own roles that can be easily changed during the battle. Roles can be upgraded and new ones can be obtained.

3/4
As a fan of the combat system from FINAL FANTASY X and FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE, I want to say that I don’t like the Active Time Battle system in this game. The developers made it too complicated, and even added an option for automatic action selection after filling the scale. Because of this, we lost one of the most interesting elements - planning your actions. And it simplifies the game a lot. You might say that you can just not to use this automatic selection function, but after a few hours of play, when there are more enemies with different weaknesses, which you can’t remember already, and they become stronger, you will start to use this function more and more often.

The music is one of the best in the entire series. Despite the fact that the music was written not by Nobuo Uematsu, but by Masashi Hamauzu, he made a great soundtrack.

4/4
There is another problem in this game. These are too strong enemies in the second half of the game. When an ordinary enemy has more than a million HP and the game forces you to start grinding. Of course, when you manage to defeat an enemy that you haven’t been able to defeat many times before, you are overwhelmed with joy. But the fact that the closer to the final, the more such difficult enemies appear, this is not nice.

I like the world of FINAL FANTASY XIII and its heroes touched my soul. And although it was very difficult for me to finish the game at the end because of the desire to complete as many submissions as possible and try to find most of the secrets. After defeating the final boss, when I watched the finale of the story, I was delighted!

This story is truly beautiful and fascinating. And I want to know how it continues in FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 and FINAL FANTASY XIII: Lightning Returns.